Better Than Facebook?

Fed up with Facebook's commercialism, four NYU students have created an open source, peer-to-peer alternative: Diaspora.

Fed up with Facebook and its limited privacy controls, four NYU college students began designing their ideal social networking site, Diaspora. The Diaspora project hopes to have its first iteration of the software available in September 2010.

We’ve known all along that Facebook was more of a commercial machine
committed to corporate advertisers than a benign platform that respects
individual users. The problem was, most of our friends and
acquaintances were already on Facebook. The site has lots of cool
features, and there was no serious alternative to migrate to.

But, as Facebook's appetite for maximum profits kicked in, we knew there would eventually be a reckoning. The uprising began when
Facebook instituted a new set of changes that make it harder and more
confusing to protect your personal information on the site. Users had
to opt-out of the default policy—which granted Facebook generous
access to your data—rather than a more reasonable opt-in policy.

Then there were the site’s privacy policy statement. At 5,830
words, the Facebook policy is thousands of words longer than those of
Flickr, Twitter and MySpace. And if you really want to protect your
personal information, it’s been pointed out,
you have to wade through 50 settings with more than 170 options. It didn’t help that founder Mark Zuckerman was
openly disdainful of the very idea of personal privacy.

As Facebook’s hubris toward users and its predatory designs on private
information became more clear, protest groups began forming on Facebook
itself and elsewhere. Thousands of users have started to abandon
Facebook the way that they once fled MySpace. It’s no longer cool to
participate in a site that mistreats its users and then serves up the
familiar corporate double-speak.

Enter four NYU college students with a plan. On Kickstarter, a site
that lets people raise money for projects, the students posted their
idea to build an open-source social networking alternative—one that
lets you control your own personal information, with no corporate
flimflam. They call it Diaspora—“the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”

Facebook is owned and designed for corporate investors, let us
remember; Diaspora will be a digital commons, a site that lets the
users own and control things themselves. While open platforms and
commons may resemble each other, only a commons vests real authority
and control with those who use it. Raffii Sofaer, one of the Diaspora
programmers, said, “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub and
have them hand it to our friends…We need to take control of our
data. Once you give it away once, it’s no longer yours.”

After the New York Times wrote an article
about the Diaspora project, the team was flooded with contributions and
offers of assistance. They’ve already raised $140,000 (their original goal was $10,000), which will
enable the developers to move from eating ramen noodles to apples, as they
put it. The team plans to work crazy hours over the summer and release
a first iteration of the software in September 2010. You can learn more
about the project here.

Interview with Elinor OstromNobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom proved that people can—and
do—work together to manage commonly held resources without degrading
them.

The Diaspora platform will enable individuals to create their own
nodes in a peer-to-peer network, rather than having everything go
through a central hub dedicated to maximizing returns to corporate
investors. Users will have control over their own private information,
and the software will have a feature that lets you reclaim your data
from the existing major social networking services.

As an open source platform, Diaspora will have open APIs
(Application Protocol Interfaces), which will enable outsider
developers to create new add-on modules to extend the capabilities of
the program. Some of the contemplated add-ons include voice-over IP,
instant messaging, and backups using distributed, encrypted protocols.

There’s no guarantee that Diaspora will be well-executed or
embraced by a huge rush of Facebook refugees. But that is certainly a
reasonable hope. The mere threat of Diaspora has already prompted
Facebook to back-pedal on its privacy changes and launch a major
damage-control offensive.

I see Diaspora as the revenge of the commons: a surge of collective
action, enabled by the Internet, to reclaim what is ours. We don’t need
no stinkin’ Facebook. The commoners can create their own platform.
Godspeed, Ilya, Dan, Max and Raff! I hope you’re ready for
your close-up.